Https://mamot.fr/@setthemfree/106014810050613790

https://mamot.fr/@setthemfree/106014810050613790

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/google-testing-its-controversial-new-ad-targeting-tech-millions-browsers-heres

Alternatives to Outlining Fully

We all know I am a huge plotter – like excel spreadsheet level – but I wasn’t always like this. I’ve used many methods in the past and here are the best ones:

The Big Plot Points 

In this method, you simply write out the big points like the catalyst, the midpoint, the climax and any big plot twists in your story. This helps you keep in mind the focus of your story as you write it, without actually plotting. 

Baby Steps 

More detailed than the Big Plot Points, Baby Steps involves writing all the little plot points down in chronological order. Think of it like a list of directions that get you from the first page to the end of the story. You can stray from the path, but this helps you know exactly where you’re going and what you want to achieve along the way. 

Next 10 Steps 

This is one I used a lot when writing fanfic in conjunction with the Big Plot Points. Here I would literally plan out the next 10 things that I wanted to happen in the story and treat it as a mini arc. If I’d known more about story structure, I could have done this 4 times and ended up with 4 acts (1, 2a, 2b, and 3). Instead, I did it 6 times and ending up with 170k words… don’t be me.

Save the Cat! Beat Sheet

An industry classic, the 15 beats of Save the Cat! can help you outline all the key moments that shape a story without interfering with panster discovery fun. This method breaks each of the 4 acts mentioned above into bite sized chunks to ensure that all elements of a compelling story are there. I would highly recommend the book Save the Cat! Writes a Novel by Jessica Brody if you want to learn more about this essential method.  

Enjoy Editing 

Finally if outlining is not for you, you’ll need to become well acquainted with editing. All drafts take editing, but many pansters will spend more time on this stage than plotters, but then plotters spend more time plotting! There’s nothing wrong with being a complete panster, but it’s worth keeping in mind if you wish to forgo the plotting stage entirely.

As always, hoped this helped! 

[If reposting to Instagram, please tag @isabellestonebooks] 

Zero Drafts and Fast Drafting

A zero draft is similar to a first draft but represents something psychologically different.  Zero drafts relieve the pressure to uphold a certain level of quality a writer might expect in a first draft. Often, zero drafts are written quickly and without completion. In this way, they bridge between an outline and a more refined draft.

For me, zero drafts allow exploration without commitment. I can extend my outline into something more tangible. Through this, I expose walls, plot holes, missing scenes, and extraneous characters. Because I use zero drafts more to test plot and characters, it is conducive to fast drafting. I know any issues I find can be fixed later and the quicker I complete this version, the quicker I can build something from the base I’ve laid.

5 Tips to Draft Quickly

Plan writing time

Writing a lot of words in a short amount of time requires dedication. If you write whenever the mood strikes you, it is unlikely you will achieve your goals. You are allowed to schedule breaks, but avoid taking more than two days off in a row.

Set deadlines

Knowing when the draft needs to be complete is more of a push than just completing is “quickly”. You can set 4 months, 4 weeks, or lengths in between depending on how seasoned you are at fast drafting.

Beyond a project deadline, daily or weekly goals will help you to monitor progress so you can adjust your process as you go.

Plan your story (at least a little)

You do not have to have a Roman numeral outline with 5 levels of depth. However, if you plan nothing, you will likely hit a wall that will break your flow. I recommend planning the following at minimum:

Main character(s)

Beginning

Overarching conflict and/or main antagonist

2-3 intermediate conflicts

Ending (optional)

Write with flow

Write however the words come. You don’t have to describe characters or setting if it doesn’t come in the moment. Likewise, you can describe in excruciating detail and cut it later. You can use placeholders, skip scenes, and write out of order. Anything that keeps you adding to the word count, do it. It can and will be fixed later. The faster you write, the faster you can edit.

Add accountability

Accountability can come internally or externally.

Internally:

Track daily word counts

Reward when you hit a milestone (chapter, word count, page count)

Externally:

Post on social media whether you hit a goal

Tell a friend

Zero drafts are good ways to get ideas out and onto the page as quickly as possible without worrying about smaller details that will be tackled in edits and later drafts.

So, United States public education, we need to have a talk about the truly terrible job you do teaching about the Holocaust...

Holocaust education in the US is...not good. The US public school system does a genuinely bad job at teaching US students about the Holocaust and, as we are now seeing in polls and surveys of millennials and Gen Z, it is leading to the slow decline of American understanding of what a horrific event the Holocaust truly was. And if we don’t teach about the Holocaust well, how do we aim at preventing another one?

So where are we going wrong? In looking back at my K-12 public school experience, and my religious school experience, I found a few issues that I think are contributing:

1) We Universalize the Holocaust

A lot of classrooms in America spend maybe a week or so teaching about the Holocaust, and devote that time almost entirely to humanizing it’s victims by participating in exercises, such reading the diary of Anne Frank, that intentionally or not make the student take the perspective of the victim.

The message that gets sent is “this could have been any of you.” But that’s just not true. The truth of the matter is that the Holocaust, or a genocide like it, couldn’t, now or then, have happened to most of them and those it could have happened to already know.

The Holocaust was the result of unique prejudices in the western world against Jews and the Romani. Hatred of those groups, and institutionalized oppression and even murder of those groups, had been the norm in Europe for over 1000 years by the time the Holocaust began. When I say institutionalized oppression and murder, I’m not talking about one-offs where one local antisemite grabbed some buds and attacked some Jews and got away with it. I’m talking about governments intentionally forbidding Jews from owning land, requiring they only live in certain areas, prohibiting participation in the vast majority of jobs, and periodically expelling or killing us.

This is necessary context, and teaching students that “this could have been you,” erases that context entirely. Because it wasn’t them, and it couldn’t have been. The Holocaust was the culmination of centuries of oppression and prejudice.

Humanize the victims of the Holocaust, yes, because we were and are human beings deserving of humane treatment, but universalizing what happened to very specific groups of people I think is more harmful than helpful on balance.

“You could’ve been the victim” takes focus away from the more likely reality: “You would have likely not been targeted this way, and been in the complicit silent majority that didn’t speak up or take action to help vulnerable people.” Why is the latter lesson so important? Because non-marginalized groups need to learn how Easy it was, and is, for the average person in the majority to brush off an ongoing atrocity against a marginalized minority. They need to learn how to spot when their silence will support oppression against their vulnerable neighbors. And when they see themselves vulnerable to being made the victims and NOT vulnerable to being made the oppressors those lessons are lost.

2) We Don’t Tackle the Silent and Complicit Majority

The dominant narrative of teaching the Holocaust in the US is: “A small number of very bad people murdered the Jews and the Romani and then the allies liberated them.” There might be some one-off stories about Hans and Sophie Scholl or a righteous gentile.

But what about everyone else? What were average people doing during the industrialized mass murder of millions of people?

Nothing out of the ordinary, it turns out, and it’s important to teach that. Your average German didn’t work in a KZ during the Holocaust, but your average German was complicit in the government that created and operated them if they didn’t speak out. We know about the Scholls because what they did was rare, not because it was common. If average people had spoken up in Germany, something could have been done. And, before people claim I’m full of shit, the Aktion T4, the Nazis’ systematic murder of the physically and intellectually disabled, WAS protested by average Germans and German institutions (like churches) and that DID force the end of the centralized program.

When we focus on heroes and victims, minimize the villains to the few who pulled the trigger, and ignore the culpability of the average person who just quietly went on with his own life and let it happen? We are teaching our kids that being silent is okay. It’s not.

3) We Conveniently Leave Out America’s Role in the Holocaust

Most American gentiles I know are ignorant as to our country’s complicity in the Holocaust. That is a problem. First, because there can be no accountability for the lives we tacitly helped end without knowing we did so. Second, because it leads to American voters not understanding the destruction we have wrought through policies that pop up cyclically in our country. Our repressive and xenophobic immigration laws contributed to the deaths of millions of people. We need to own that.

America, Britain, and nearly every other nation in the world refused to allow Jewish refugees in EVEN WHEN HITLER OFFERED TO LET THEM LEAVE GERMANY IF OTHERS WOULD TAKE THEM. None of those countries would help them.

And, don’t let our convenient silence fool you, the Allies knew that the Holocaust was going on. They knew about the ghettos. The KZs. The death camps. They could show you Auschwitz on a map and explain what it’s purpose was. And with that information they did...just about nothing, other than suppressing news reports of the atrocities happening in Europe. Our inaction during the Holocaust was so egregious that the US Department of Treasury at the time issued a memo titled

The Allies may have ultimately liberated many of the KZs and death camps, but let’s not forget that was more “bonus good deed” than their actual intent.

4) We Undersell the Scope of the Destruction

6 million Jews, 1.5 million of them five years old or younger. 1.5 million Romani. Most schools teach those top line numbers, at least the 6 million figure. But they don’t explain what it means. Those are big numbers, sure, but they lack context.

So let’s recontextualize those numbers and explain what they mean.

The Nazis murdered a full two-thirds of all the Jews in Europe. They murdered one-third of all Jews in the world. In 1939 there were 3,250,000 Jews in Poland. In 1946 there were 100,000. Nazis murdered 97% of Polish Jews. (There are around 3,200 today, which is a discussion for another time.)

To put all this in perspective, there are still fewer Jews alive today than there were alive in 1933.

That is the scope of the industrialized genocide we are talking about.

And those numbers don’t account for the lingering impacts on those that weren’t murdered. Studies since have shown that the trauma altered the DNA of survivors and their direct descendants, making us prone to all manner of negative health outcomes. The Nazis’ harm to Europe’s Jews didn’t end at murder, it is also generational harm with real health consequences for direct descendants and is a lingering generational trauma for Jews writ large.

5) We Teach the Holocaust Like It Happened a Long Time Ago to Long-Lost Groups of People

It stunned my classmates in public school to learn my grandmother - who lived with us and who drove me to school - was a survivor of the Holocaust. They were equally shocked to learn that the Romani are still around. They exist. I have met people who didn’t realize the Jews were still alive either.

We focus on black and white photographs of old-timey transports of people in clothes that look straight out of the Old Country without any thought as to how that translates to young students. That presentation makes the event seem longer ago than it was. It distances them and their ancestors from it. My grandmother died in 2019. My eight year-old knew her. Two of my grandmothers’ older sisters, one a KZ survivor, are still alive today.

The Holocaust did not happen in some ancient time when people didn’t know better. It happened during the dawn of the atomic age, when the average American owned at least one vehicle, when phones were ubiquitous in offices and homes, less than 20 years before DARPA created the predecessor to the internet. Antisemitism’s adherents weren’t backwards and superstitious idiots. They thought themselves scientists, and it was the language of “race science” (language they got from us Americans) rather than religion that they used to justify their crimes against humanity.

When we teach the Holocaust like it happened “so long ago” we make it seem like modern people would never be susceptible to such hatred in modern times. It’s not true. And we do minorities a disservice when we act like it is. Baseless racial, ethnic, and religious hatred still exist; we haven’t evolved that much since the Holocaust and that isn’t surprising given how recent it was.

This list isn’t exhaustive. I’ve got more. But I think these issues loom largest over the state of Holocaust education in the US and it’s time we talk about them.

Good stuff.

#JUNKTERRORBILL please sign the petition

Change.org

Sign the Petition

JUNK THE ANTI-TERRORISM BILL AND UPHOLD HUMAN RIGHTS!